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Kamala Harris might run for president again in 2028. Please, no | Arwa Mahdawi
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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politics
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the key here is “proper primary.” I can’t remember a time when they’ve had one that wasn’t fucked up in some way.
1992? 2000? 2004? 2008? 2020?
2008. They were NOT expecting Obama to oust Hillary, and took steps to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. Allegedly the new DNC head or whatever his title is wants fair primaries, so I guess we’ll see.
They orchestrated Obama's upset, that was Schumer and Pelosi's plan they went behind Hillary's back and got the party to back Obama.
What about 2008? It wasn't fair?
As far as I know/remember it was, at least as fair as any primary with superdelegates can be. Or rather, it was still using an unfair system and enough people turned out so that the system to keep nominations “in check” didn’t work.
Cynthia McKinney was elected as a Democrat in Georgia around that time. iirc she was looking at a presidential run. You might have seen her on here yesterday for her latest tweet. (Spoiler: super bigot)
Which is to say, if you open the field to everyone in the country you will spend a certain amount of time winnowing the contenders from the stunt candidates. Republicans don't do that because they're all the same candidate. So they spend almost zero time (since Perot) dealing with that.
Superdelegates aren't great, but an alternative to achieve that aim of not having to platform every trust fund kid with a boot on their head might be good.
She ran as a Green Party candidate, not a Democratic one. I’m not sure how she’s relevant?
She was pretty suspect even in 2008, so I’m not sure I buy that if we don’t have superdelegates and let voters decide who the candidates are, then the stupid masses will just pick whoever.
Oh man you’re right I’d forgotten that.
I don’t think superdelegates are to prevent popular candidates (see Obama), I think they’re to get a comprehensible slate of candidates to focus on issues and themes and not on turning the Iowa caucus into something bizarre by claiming to be a Democrat who just happens to demand we all live in the sea or something.
Again, republicans don’t have this problem, and they’re well known to fund ‘spoiler candidates’ with the intention of wrecking momentum or message or other campaign aspects.
Even 2016 was pretty fair. The nomination went to the person with the most votes and the majority of the non-super delegates. Bernie lost because people didn't want to vote for him because of a variety of reasons but not because the primary wasn't "fair". If more people voted for him he would have won.
No, Bernie had the nom stolen by Hillary and DWS via corrupt back room dealings and superdelegate shenanigans. Everyone was voting Bernie and for the corporate elite that was a problem. They solved it by ratfucking the primaries, a tried and true dem tactic.
Agreed 100%.
Source: I was there. Bernie got screwed because the dems through it was “Hillary’s turn”.
Fuck that.
Ah yes, super delegate shenanigans like the majority going to the candidate who had over 3 million more votes than the other. The only way Bernie could have won with super delegates is if he got almost all of them. And if he did then the candidate who got 3 million less votes would have won the nomination and we would still be facing people saying the democratic primaries aren't "fair".
Now don't get me wrong, DWS was biased as fuck. But if the voters simply turned out and voted for Bernie then bias wouldn't have mattered. The RNC was biased towards Jeb bush and Ted Cruz but you know how that turned out.
You can't use the result of the ratfucking to explain that there wasn't ratfucking...
She couldn't have cheated, she had more points
Clinton literally controlled the DNC treasury during that election. The party was low on funding due to mismanagement during the Obama years, she lent it money in return for control, next thing you know, media is flooded with articles talking up Clinton having all the superdelegate votes so being so far ahead before any real votes were cast...even when Bernie won states, it was all "doesn't matter he still can't make up for the SDs"
Uh oh
(I agree, although DWS really screwed up everything including discussing this)
Yeah this is something that really bothers me about my fellow leftists and is pure revisionism about the 2016 primary. Bernie lost fair and square and all we had to do to make sure that didn't happen was get more people to vote for him. But according to many people on here if the candidate fails to win then it's their sole fault because they couldn't convince voters to go with them. But I guess that doesn't apply to Bernie.
Also I hate how DWS screwed up talking about this all because she was biased as fuck towards Clinton. Her bias wouldn't have mattered if more people had voted for Bernie but her having a bias at all must mean Bernie was cheated out of the nomination.
[Citation needed]
I think where a lot of this comes from is that HRC had locked in the vast majority of the superdelegates right from the start. The media consistently represented Bernie as having no chance to win, due to all the superdelegates being in the bag for Clinton, regardless of how people voted. This depressed progressive turnout, as a Clinton victory was apparently a foregone conclusion. Absent the superdelegate system, and the lopsided media coverage it engendered, many would argue the result would have been different. Obviously, there's no way of knowing at this point, but it's not as if these claims have no basis in reality.
See now that's an actual conversation to have! Not saying that Clinton cheated and/or was always going to be the candidate but that how the media represented the race depressed turnout. That's a thing that continues to happen from the media trying to suppress progressive turnout and it often works. But those things still don't change that if those progressives hadn't been so easily suppressed and had continued to go out and fight and vote regardless of what the media said, just like trump voters did, then Bernie would have won the primary and the super delegates wouldn't have mattered. And then likely would have won versus Trump, in my opinion.
Indeed. Conversely, if the GOP had had superdelegates, Trump may never have won the nomination. Superdelegates are inherently anti-populist, which cuts both ways.
If you call wall to wall Propaganda about how it doesn't matter how Bernie is winning all these states, all the superdelegates are going to Clinton and she wins basically by default?
Like that wasn't designed to dissuade voters?
It’s so nice to see a sane take on that. Thank you.
2024 was the only year recently we didn't have a primary.
neat. i have been voting for longer than that. there have been years where there was only one person on the primary, which efficiently means “primary votes are cancelled” - when the dnc say they want the incumbent.
that is a de facto cancellation. telling the people who could vote that they are ignored.
my point stands: the dem side needs to do a better job.
I've been voting since I was 18 and I've never seen that in the past 16 years. 2024 was skipping because Biden was the incumbent at the time. Incumbent are almost always given the primary. The GOP does the same and is entirely different.
yeah. see. i disagree that incumbents should be given anything. earn it. primary every time.
i have been voting since 1997.
I agree with you, but as devil's advocate, why would a political party vie against itself for a seat it already holds. At best, it would only slightly sully the incumbent's name. Take Biden for example: either he's doing a good job, or he needs to be replaced because he's not doing a good enough job.
Parties shouldn't have that kind of operational control over our elections.
why? imho because its supposed to represent the current situation and overton window not be a reminder the parties are “clubs” that set their own rules.
From what I've read the reason primaries aren't done on incumbents is because every single time it's been tried the incumbent lost the actual election and the seat went to the other party.
? If incumbent wins the primary its the same as if they didn’t have one but at least the party members chose.
primaries are separate by party.
It's not a thing that happens often, but as far as I can find every single time the incumbent president has had someone try to primary them, the incumbent's entire party lost the seat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_challenge
I mean, in the current system if there's enough desire from within the party to push to primary the incumbent president, they were already pretty unpopular.
It's not the primary that's causing them to lose, it's that the party had thought a primary was even necessary because they were already likely going to lose.
interesting. maybe a spread in focus leads to loss.
My assumption is that primary related mud slinging depresses enthusiasm among the public for the incumbent, combined with attempts at it only being made when the incumbent is relatively unpopular anyway.
Nope. Bernie should have won the primary but the dems decided it was “Hillary’s turn” so they fucked Bernie.
Bernie didn't have the votes. Period.
I voted for Bernie, but most people I knew at the time voted for Hillary because of the name recognition.
Argue all you want, but facts are facts.
[Citation Needed]
2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
On July 22, WikiLeaks published the Democratic National Committee email leak, in which DNC operatives seemed to deride Bernie Sanders' campaign[12] and discuss ways to advance Clinton's nomination,[13] leading to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other implicated officials. The leak was allegedly part of an operation by the Russian government to undermine Hillary Clinton.[14][15] Although the ensuing controversy initially focused on emails that dated from relatively late in the primary, when Clinton was already close to securing the nomination,[13] the emails cast doubt on the DNC's neutrality and, according to Sanders operatives and multiple media commentators, showed that the DNC had favored Clinton since early on.
The Dems fucked Bernie. From your own sources.
All I was talking about was 2016.
Sure, but a proper one? 2020 and 2016 were both ratfucked. 2012 was an incumbent year. So we'll be at 2 decades since the last time we had a proper primary.
What was ratfucked about 2020? 2020 didn't feel that different from 2008 or 2004.
In 2020 Bernie and Biden were the front-runners, and then all the other candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden. So it wasn't ratfucked in an illegal way, but in a "torpedo a popular leftist in favor of a right-of-center establishment neolib" way.
Biden wasn't even in the top 5 for the first like 4-5 races. He did ok in one, then the whole orchestrated dropout occured to manufacture consent
That's absolutely not true. I've been voting since 2012 and the only presidential primary I've voted in that had more than one candidate was the Hillary-Bernie primary. That's the only one.
It absolutely is true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
In 2012 Obama was the incumbent, which again as I mentioned, incumbents typically aren't primaried if they are doing a decent job and up for re-election.
Since then there was 2016, 2020, where both years had a primary for the DNC. 2024 was just a fluke because Biden should have dropped out. Or even stuck with his original campaign promise of not running for re-election. You're young and your sample size is 4. My sample size is 5, but it's been consistent in years prior.
Depending on your state. In mine, there was a single candidate. That's a primary in the same way the USSR had elections. If you lived in one of the states that had two candidates in 2020 then good for you. I didn't.